Posted
by
Roblimo
on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @04:18PM
from the sometimes-it's-better-and-costs-less-to-stick-with-proven-hardware dept.

Ben Blair is CTO of MarkITx, a company that brokers used commercial IT gear. This gives him an excellent overview of the marketplace -- not just what companies are willing to buy used, but also what they want to sell as they buy new (or newer) equipment. Ben's main talking point in this interview is that hardware has become so commoditized that in a world where most enterprise software can be virtualized to run across multiple servers, it no longer matters if you have the latest hardware technology; that two older servers can often do the job of one new one -- and for less money, too. So, he says, you should make sure you buy new hardware only when necessary, not just because of the "Ooh... shiny!" factor" (Alternate Video Link)

Robin
Miller: This is Ben
and he works for a company called MarkITx. Am
I pronouncing it right, Ben?

Ben
Blair: Absolutely,
MarkITx, yeah.

Robin
Miller: They're
dealers of used
enterprise level IT hardware, which means they
have kind of an
interesting view on what’s hot and what’s not, and what’s
going to be hot and what people are buying and what they’re
dumping.

So,
Ben, what’s hot?

Ben
Blair: We see
mostly networking gear – well one small correction. We’re
a place to buy and sell. We
don’t buy and sell ourselves, so we help
the buyer and seller
come together, but like you said we see all this order flow, and
what’s interesting – so what’s hot is mostly
networking gear. We see a whole lot of Dell and HP servers as well,
and a lot of other kinds of equipment but that’s sort of like
the fat tail of things, right, there’s like thousands of things
we see once or twice, but a whole lot of things. It’s
Cisco, Gear, Juniper, Arista, Aerohive, HP, Dell, IBM servers, kind
of across the board.

Robin
Miller: Well,
either the last video or the one before that we did was about HP's
new... no
they’re not blade servers, they’re calling them
cartridges or something.

Ben
Blair: Yeah.

Robin
Miller: Basically
they
stick a whole bunch of single board servers in
a chassis. I remember that as blade servers, but that’s because
I’m old. So it’s obviously not that

Ben
Blair: Heh.
I mean, yeah,
it’s just people are looking for new ways to get better power
density and better weight density really in their cabinets, and it
makes a lot of sense. I mean, you raised an interesting question in
the email (that led up
to this interview), actually,
which was sort of what’s driving a lot of these changes and the
OEMs and the vendors I think would have you believe that there are
new features. You know, okay, great, HP has got a new cartridge based
system. You can have higher density and that’s

Robin
Miller: Yeah.

Ben
Blair:It
improvesthe calculation
incrementally, but if you think, I mean, back to mid-1990s and even
into early 2000s, the hardware really did drive things. You’d
get the next generation of Intel chips and boy, if you’re
running a database that had heavy load, you needed to upgrade it.
That was your path to better performance. And since we were in the
web world and everything has moved to scale out. You
got so much more load you couldn’t possibly fit it on a server
no matter how awesome it was, right? So we had a smart and hard
software problem of, “Let’s
make sure this can run on like 4 or 5 or 10 or 100 or 10,000
servers,” and once you solved that problem this was
really the thing that changed. It doesn’t matter so much
anymore that you have one server that’s more powerful or even
an enclosure that’s a little bit more power efficient. I mean,
they’re advertising, I don’t know, 80-some-odd-percent
power efficiency, which is fantastic. But it’s not going to
fundamentally change what you can do any more. You already have to
have things scale out and then it’s just a cost trade off, and
this is why I’m not trying to talk about why what we’re
doing is interesting, but fundamentally that
it's the fact that
software is eating the world, that means hardware is becoming a
commodity, and so it doesn’t matter if you’re buying
servers, like HP wants you to believe that if I buy this server, it
will reduce my cost; if I bought cheaper servers that would reduce my
cost as well, I don’t necessarily need fancier ones. And as
long as my software can run equally across all of them because it’s
already scaled out, it’s not this need thing, I don’t
need a server that’s twice as good, right. I need twice as many
servers and I can have them more dense, less dense, those are all
then tradeoffs. As much as I’m a technologist and I want to be
in charge of all the stuff that’s almost a finance decision,
it’s like, look, I just need 50 cores and 80 terabytes of
storage to do this and I need this I/O bandwidth, but exactly how
that’s delivered to me, I don’t really care anymore.

Robin
Miller: The funny
thing is, one thing I hear made much of this power savings. I could
see that being important to Google. I could see that being important
to IBM or Amazon, but I do not know the people I know who are IT guys
or like small and medium sized businesses. You have 200 employees in
your business, you have 500, you have 1000. Let’s say you have
150 desktops, you have 200 computing devices in a factory or
warehouse, and some of them could be tablets, who knows, and you have
a bunch of servers, let’s say 50 servers even. How much money
are you
going to save on electricity? $100 a year?

Ben
Blair: Yeah. It’s
a good question. I mean, yeah, on a scale of 50 servers, I mean it
may be more than that, but let me give you the answer, slightly
different question, but one that I can answer to say I have more
firsthand experience.

Robin
Miller: Yeah.

Ben
Blair: Now suppose
you’re in a co-lo facility, right? And
there the costs are more concrete, like I’m paying $2,000 a
month for a cabinet and however many amps of power are going to that
cabinet, so my power costs are fixed, but what I can do with that
power is sort of where it matters to me, so if I can have servers
that are twice as efficient I can put twice as many servers in that
cabinet before I need to buy a whole new cabinet for another $2,000 a
month or whatever. So there it can matter, but it’s, I mean, I
don’t know, a 2x factor; like in power efficiency it is often
more like 20%, 30% as long as you are not talking versus something 8
years old.

Robin
Miller: But even if
it’s 2x and you’re talking at the most in mid-thousands
annually, it’s not a world changer. It’s
the
difference between buying a cheap used car or not buying one.

Ben
Blair: Yeah,
exactly, and it’s just trading off sort of operational dollars
for dollars upfront; like your car example, I can buy a more
expensive car today that saves me gas, but how long before that pays
off?

Robin
Miller: Used
equipment, obviously you guys are brokering it, it’s coming
through your thing, this is getting hot, you are seeing volumes go
up?

Ben
Blair: Yeah,
volumes are up really significantly. I mean, if you look at it,
I am sure you’ve experienced this and probably everyone who's
on Slashdot has a closet full of old stuff, right?

Robin
Miller: Yeah.

Ben
Blair: And this is
true whether you are a small shop or if you are a giant bank, except
instead of a closet
it’s a warehouse, but it’s hard to deal with this stuff
and as technologists, this is sort of eye opening for me getting into
this, like I always had the view too that I want the thing that’s
going to help me do my job and the cool new thing. And
then I get the next generation, what do I do with this stuff? I don’t
know. I don’t want to throw it away, that’s really wrong,
and I got all these other things to do, so just like put it back
there somewhere, right.

Robin
Miller: Yeah.

Ben
Blair: And that’s
a fine decision sort of once or twice and then you do it, you know,
do it over and over and pretty quickly you got a warehouse. And so
it’s crazy.
So the good thing for us, it’s a pretty easy conversation to
have with someone, hey, all that stuff that you think isn’t
worth anything, it’s actually maybe half or a third of it isn’t
worth much and we can help you recycle it. But a surprising amount,
half, two-thirds, if we’re talking to like financial
institutions that are refreshing every year-and-a-half, maybe it’s
three-quarters of the stuff they have is perfectly good, and lots of
people want to use it. We’re not in the time
again -- to go back to like late 1990s, early 2000s – where
corporates were increasing fast, you have technically more hardware
imrpovements going. But
software has changed that. So now if you’re a smart company, if
you’re thinking like some of our customers, our buyers are
small... mid-size and small companies, the whole business is renting
used hardware, right? They may buy it new most of the time, but the
minute they have one customer running on it, and then the next one,
it’s used in a sense, right? And they’ll run it for 4 or
5 years.

Robin
Miller: And we know
off-lease, a lot of people lease their
computers.

Ben
Blair: Yeah.

Robin
Miller: And that’s
where I first saw used computers, in a commercial and legal sense,
was coming off-lease.

Ben
Blair: Yeah.

Robin
Miller: Like you
said, you rent them, and the second you take it home, it’s
used.

Ben
Blair: Exactly.

Robin
Miller: So why not
get a used one?

Ben
Blair: The
economics for buying even one server or one switch, it’s better
if we are buying used. But it’s not going to change your world,
right. Where it really matters is if you are buying 10 or 30 or 50,
right, and then that can make a really huge difference and so I
think, you are not talking about like the Windows 95 revolution where
everything, suddenly,
really was obsolete,
you simply couldn’t run the software you wanted on it, and now
if you’re running a pizza box and it’s got two quadcores
instead of one quadcore or four quadcores or Intel or AMD, I mean,
these all make incremental differences, but they don’t say
whether you can run a piece of software or not, and either way, if
you’re running any kind of sizable infrastructure, your
software is already built to be distributed over dozens of machines,
and if you have twice as many machines with half the performance,
it’s not an even trade off necessarily, in some scenarios, but
it’s close to it.

I can't see the video but in the summary he mentions using two old servers to do the job of one new server. I appreciate the recycling, but it sounds like he is talking processing or I/O equivalence, and usually it is power that is the dominating factor in data center effectiveness. Are two servers really cheaper than one when you factor in electricity, cooling, and rack space?

If you're saying HP doesn't produce quality gear, you have apparently not used their servers. There's a reason they're one of very few top-tier server vendors, and it's because they do produce some great gear. I came from an all-HP shop, and I'm currently in an all-Dell shop. Both manufacturers have their strengths and weaknesses, but all things considered they're approximately equivalent.

At one point the interviewer asks "how much money you gonna save on electricity for 50 computers, $50/year"? It's clear he's never even attempted to do the math. An extra 100 watts in California is going to cost $314.91 per year at the typical rate (above baseline) of 35.949 cents per year. That's just the savings on one computer system much less 50 computers.